Butchering Freedom Rangers

WARNING! If you are squeamish about seeing animals being butchered then please skip this post.

So the day finally came when our Freedom Ranger Chickens were big enough to be butchered. I will take you through most of the process in this post.

This is one of 3 cages loaded with our chickens.

My husband said "We picked them up in a little box and it takes a trailer to take them to be butchered."

Why are the looking at me like that?

They really were not hard to butcher for they did not have the personality of my laying hens and roosters. If you raise chickens you understand what I mean by personality when it comes to a chicken.

This is the killing cones. You put the chickens in head first and slit their necks letting them bleed out till dead. I did not photograph this part of the process because, well this was the hardest part for me to watch.

This is the scalding tank. It is made from a water heater and runs on propane. I forgot to take a picture of all the gauges on the back. Anyway it heats the water to 149 degrees.


Then we dunk the chickens in two at a time until their feathers pull out easily.

This is the inside of the chicken plucker. This was so amazing to me how fast it pulled the feathers from the chickens.

The chickens were put in and with the plucker running and as it spun some water was sprayed in and wa-lah, featherless chickens.

The chickens were then taken to the butchering table. I did not photograph the step by step process at this stage. Maybe that can be an idea for a future post.

Oh that was a good size rooster.

My husband is the one facing the camera.

After the guys butchered them they gave them a good rinse and then I took them and packaged then in plastic wrap and freezer bags.

In the end, on this day, we put 33 chickens in our freezer.

Thank you to Rick for letting us use all of your great butchering equipment. Thank you to Shad for all of your help. Thanks to my hubby for putting up with these not so bright chickens, I know we will appreciate it the winter when we have roasted chicken or chicken noodle soup. By the way the term homemade chicken noodle soup will have way more meaning for us now.

Freedom Rangers

After raising chickens for the past 5-6 years for egg production by husband Bill and I began talking about raising chickens for meat. We had friends who had raised Cornish Cross and after witnessing their birds I was completely turned off by the idea. Cornish Cross grow too fast for their bodies to keep up with. Many of them dye from heart attacks or they cant stand up to eat their own food. Now I know these birds are being raised to eat but I do desire to eat something that was raised in humane conditions and had a healthy life.

A friend of Bills passed a magazine article on to us that discussed Freedom Ranger chickens. Freedom Ranger chickens were first developed in France in the 1960's. They were developed for the French program, Label Rouge, which takes pride in the high quality of their birds. Many restaurants in France use Freedom Rangers. These birds came to the US in 2000 via a hatchery in Canada. Within a few years this hatchery closed down and now small farms are choosing to raise these birds instead of the Cornish Cross.

Freedom Rangers are great foraging free range birds. Many rave about the taste which is due to their slow growth and free range ability. Freedom Rangers will have a long body, small breast and longer legs (I like dark meat better anyway). I am willing to sacrifice the final dressed weight of the bird in exchange for taste and quality of how they are raised and processed.

So we finally decided these were the birds that we would start this adventure with. A group of us ordered a large quantity of chicks through JM Hatchery. The first batch we got was 24 and then 25. We have only lost 1 chick so far. They seem to be good healthy birds.

These chicks were from our fist purchase they are about 4 weeks old and will soon be going to an outdoor pen that we will be building this coming week. We are working on plans for a chicken tractor setup that can be used during the day then move them to a safe pen at night.

These cute little chicks are about 1 1/2 weeks old. We just picked them up 3 days ago.

So far things are going well with this little experiment. I will use this blog to keep track of our progress from now to the dinner table (YUM). So keep checking back as the weeks go by.